I feel old saying this, but having used computers since before external hard drives existed, I can say with certainty that buying a hard drive is easier today than it’s ever been before. For traditional drives, prices are low, options are numerous, and capacities are so high that your only choices are “enough space,” “more than enough space,” and “way more than enough space.” I could point you towards a gigantic 5-Terabyte $139 Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive right now and end this article without another paragraph. Since Apple doesn’t even sell a Mac with that much disk space, you could back up five (or more) computers to that drive without running out of room. Or you could store a decade worth of digital photos alongside a giant media library. For $139!
But buying an external hard drive isn’t necessarily that simple. There are a bunch of factors worth considering before making a purchase, including everything from reliability to portability, design, capacity, speed, and connectivity. Some hard drives are really cheap but have a higher chance of failing after a year or two of heavy use. So in this How-To, I’m going to discuss the big issues you need to consider, and guide you towards the best external hard drive for your needs…
Quick Overview
Most hard drives are guaranteed to work for one to two years no matter what you do with them, ranging from occasional backups to continuous video streaming. They’ll generally last much longer if you don’t use them every day. However — and this is really important — if you keep a typical drive mechanism running 24 hours each day for two years, it’s going to burn out. Hard drive longevity used to be measured with an estimate of “Mean Time Before Failure” (MTBF). Each year has 61,320 hours, so a drive with a MTBF of 300,000 hours would promise to last 4.9 years if actively used 24 hours each day. Desktop drives typically promised higher MTBFs than laptop drives, but there were exceptions.
Unfortunately, MTBF numbers were only predictions — and often inaccurately high. Consumers complained. So drive makers switched to a different but even less useful metric: Annualized Failure Rate (AFR), which estimates the percentage of total drives made that will fail in a year due to manufacturing defects. All an AFR of “0.73%” suggests is that 7,300 of 1,000,000 drives will likely develop problems in year one due to defects rather than abuse. That low percentage may seem reassuring, but it obscures the reality that heavy drive use increases failures over time, and some drives are much better-suited to heavy use than others.
My advice: purchase your drive with a specific purpose in mind. If you’re backing up precious photos, home videos, or important files, buy a name brand, desktop-sized hard drive from a company with a track record of reliability, and pay a little more for it. It doesn’t really matter how the drive looks, just that it will work for a long time. But if you’re just using a drive to store apps, games, or iTunes movies that you can easily re-download at any time, or only intermittently turn a drive on for backups, you can feel comfortable going with something cheaper, more portable, or fancier-looking.
Capacity + Pricing
It’s easy to pick the right hard drive capacity these days: most external drives now offer at least as much space as a standard Mac (1TB) — and there are thousands of options to choose from — and you can get an 8-Terabyte drive for only $300. Most people will find that that 4TB is more than enough to hold years of accumulated photos, media files, and data, but there’s no wrong answer to the capacity question: it’s mostly a matter of personal preference right now. That said, there are sweet spots.
Expect to pay around $70 for a basic 1TB drive, $85 for 2TB, $100 for 3TB, $120 for 4TB, $150 for 5TB, $250 for 6TB, or $300 for 8TB. By “basic,” I mean the popular Expansion and Backup Plus consumer-grade desktop drives shown above from Seagate, a major (but not top) drive manufacturer with a good (but not great) warranty. The prices for Seagate’s Backup Plus Slim portable drives are similar up until the 4TB mark, where the price doubles. Generally, 3TB to 5TB would be the sweet spots between capacity and pricing, but Amazon customer reviews of the 3TB Expansion mirror comments I’ve seen elsewhere online: Seagate’s 3TB units had lots of problems. You’re better off considering 2TB, 4TB or 5TB units instead.
Don’t be surprised that longer-lasting drives can cost twice as much as basic models. They’ll typically last longer, which is worth something. Similarly, don’t be surprised if a solid state drive (SSD) costs much more and offers lower capacity than a mechanical drive. SSDs are just beginning to become mainstream internal drives for computers, and their capacities aren’t yet at the “more than enough space” point.
Reliability
Since MTBF and AFR are such sketchy measures of hard drive reliability, I suggest that you focus on two more tangible factors: the reputation of the manufacturer, and the length of the drive’s warranty. A three-year warranty is the best you can expect from a consumer-grade external drive from a top vendor, regardless of whether it’s a mechanical drive or SSD. (Only the very best internal SSDs now offer consumer 5-year and professional 10-year warranties, though notably with much less storage space than the drives covered in this article. See my How-To guides to SSDs for iMac, desktop Macs, and MacBooks here.)
If reliability is your major concern, as it generally is mine, I’d suggest you look most seriously at G-Technology’s mechanical drives (featuring ultra-reliable Hitachi hard drive mechanisms) and Samsung’s external SSDs, all of which have three-year warranties. I reviewed G-Tech’s excellent G-Drive USB for 9to5Mac, and have trusted their earlier drives for many years without any issues. Samsung’s T1 SSD was covered in my guide to SSDs for Mac minis and MacBooks, and while it’s more expensive and lower-capacity than the G-Drive USB, it has no moving parts to worry about. Go with a G-Drive if you need a large reliable drive, or T1 if you want something small and reliable.
Portability + Design
There are five major types of external hard drives: enterprise-class desktop drives, regular desktop drives, laptop-class portable drives, slim laptop-class portable drives, and flash drives. The first two use 3.5″ hard drive mechanisms and are effectively non-portable: they sit on your desk, depend on wall power, and aren’t easy to carry in typical bags. Flash drives are keychain-sized but relatively limited in capacity and crazy expensive when they begin to approach laptop drive capacities. (Corsair makes $45 128GB and $75 256GB USB 3.0 flash drives if you want something tiny.) So if you need a portable hard drive with respectable storage capacity at a reasonable price, you’ll most likely pick a laptop-class drive with a 2.5″ hard drive mechanism inside.
Owned by Seagate, boutique drive maker LaCie’s lineup nicely illustrates the relative size differences between the categories of external drives, though there are even smaller laptop and slim laptop drives out there now. In January, I reviewed both Seagate’s Seven, the world’s thinnest external mechanical hard drive, and LaCie’s Mirror, a boxy mirrored drive with twice the capacity. Both use USB 3.0 for data and power, with no need for an external power supply. Either one can easily fit into a laptop bag, backpack, or purse, but Seven is much, much smaller.
If you want a portable, reliable hard drive at a low price with minimal design frills, consider Western Digital’s #1 best-selling My Passport Ultra drives, which have a 4.5/5-Star Amazon user rating. But if you’re looking for something with a distinctive design — and willing to compromise a little on long-term reliability — LaCie’s collection of Philippe Starck, Neil Poulton, and Porsche Design drives are definitely the best around. Pick the one that appeals to your personal taste.
Speed, Connectivity, iOS Compatibility, and Apple’s AirPort Time Capsules
A lot could be said about each of these topics, but I’ll save you some time and cut to the chase: recent developments mean that most people will be best off with USB 3.0 wired drives, except under one of three circumstances: you need incredible speed for Mac video editing, you want to stream video to your iOS devices, or you want to do automated wireless backups.
If you’re planning on doing 4K or other disk-intensive Mac video editing, Thunderbolt hard drives such as Elgato’s Thunderbolt+ Drive or G-Tech’s G-RAID Studio Thunderbolt 2 can deliver dramatically better speeds than drives that share your Mac’s USB bus. They’re much more expensive than comparably capacious USB drives, but they’re built for professional use, and priced accordingly. That said, USB 3.0 drives tend to outperform prior-generation FireWire 800 drives, which were adequate for pre-4K editing, so most users will have no need to look for faster options. If you’re concerned about real-world speeds for a USB drive, check the manufacturer’s stated “up to XXXMB/second transfer rates” claims and subtract around 10-20% for real world performance.
If you want to use your hard drive to store content that can also be streamed to your iOS device, consider Western Digital’s My Passport Wireless ($165/1TB, $190/2TB) or Seagate’s Wireless Plus ($135/500GB, $160/1TB, $190/2TB), which offer integrated Wi-Fi streaming, a built-in battery for completely wireless operation, and USB connectivity for synchronization. I’ve tested both, and while Seagate’s version has the edge on pricing, speed, and battery performance, My Passport Wireless has an SD slot built in to back up your digital photos on the road. iOS users will have a better experience with the Wireless Plus, while Mac users and digital photographers with infrequent iOS needs may prefer My Passport Wireless. Go with the one that best suits your needs.
Last but not least, if you want to do automated wireless backups, consider — but think carefully about — an Apple AirPort Time Capsule. I currently use the latest version of Time Capsule, which has been completely redesigned and has fast 802.11ac wireless with your choice of a 2TB ($280) or 3TB ($350) hard drive. On a positive note, it works completely as expected, and although the initial Time Machine backup process for a large Mac hard drive is incredibly slow, incremental backups later on are fine. My concerns are mostly in reliability and pricing. I’ve had two prior-generation Time Capsules experience hard drive issues, and though Apple may have fixed those problems with the new model, it’s very easy to go out and buy a standalone drive for much less. I’m not a big fan of wireless drives right now, but continue to hope that wireless technology will catch up with the demands of current machines. All of my important files are on a wired G-Drive USB, and they will probably stay there for the foreseeable future.
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I use exactly MyBook Studio 4TB for my Mac which is shown on the first picture. Strongly recommended.
If you only backup to one external drive, then you are asking for trouble. Always best to use at least two external drives (not in RAID0 .. scary RAID). Don’t delete any important files unless you have at least two good backups on different drives (better to have three really).
You can have the /best/ available drive, no matter the cost, and it can still fail.
Also, starting and stopping devices gives far greater chance of failure than keeping a drive running long term in a suitable climate controlled environment.
I own a data recovery business. Allow me cut to the chase.
In order of quality: Western Digital (WD). Hitachi (now owned by WD). Seagate.
Do not even consider: Fujitsu. Toshiba nor Lacie. Lacie uses whatever mechanism (drive) they can buy for the cheapest price, but worst of all, their boards (the actual electronics) are terrible and will fry any drive. Their inverters have a habit of failing, sending a power-surge to your drive, frying it.
If you want to be safe, just stick with WD. 20 years ago they were one of the worst drive makers. Today they are the best for reliability. They always trial Seagate in maximum capacity drives, for good reason, they care more about reliability than anything else.
Based on test statistics across tons of drives, BackBlaze ranks Hitachi drives over WD drives over Seagate. The stats suggest 1/2 as many Hitachi failures as WDs. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ Not everyone values reliability as highly as design or pricing, but as the article said, if you want the most reliable drives, go Hitachi.
All the drives they tested are 3.5″ DESKTOP drives, not 2.5″ mobile drives which are the vast majority of all drives sold today, so their results are irrelevant. WD for instance OWNS the portable drive space, and yet we see precious few of them. :)
Hard to understand why anyone would recommend 2.5″ mobile drives over top 3.5″ drives for reliability.
Thanks for the heads-up! I almost made the mistake of getting a Toshiba today. I’m getting a Seagate!
I also own a data recovery company (www.retrodata.co.uk), and for many years, we have been receiving more WD drives than any other brand for attention. (I’m talking 2.5″ drives here.)
Granted, WD market penetration plays a fairly hefty role in this.
What is awkward about WD (from a recovery point of view) is that their assembly method means that once the top lid is flipped open, the headstack alignment is lost, which dramatically complicates data recovery efforts.
My choice of drive remains the Hitachi.
One catastrophic failing with WD 6TB drives and larger, is that if you move the drive once powered on, a head crash is a strong possibility once G-forces come into play. This happened to me twice; once, when I (extremely cautiously and gently) moved a running WD drive from one shelf to another. And I do mean gently. However, this was sufficient to allow the read/write heads to crash onto the platters.
A colleague managed the same mistake.
Given that many users have a habit of relocating NAS devices / external hard drives whilst powered on, I would say that this alone would preclude me from opting for these drives.
I’ve got 10 Western Digital drives, ranging from 1 TB – 4 TB. The ones I bought back when 1 TB seemed like a lot? Still running. No failures at all, though they’re almost all archival. One of them, a 3 TB, is my daily drive, the one I use for iTunes.
A LaCie 250 GB drive failed after 3 or 4 years. By then, I’d moved everything to a WD drive. Not interested anymore in LaCie. Too much money for the bytes, although their designs are good.
My only complaint about WD is the software. They could make it easier to convert their generic My Book to Max OS X journaled. Fortunately, Disk Utility on the Mac takes care of that.
I like caldigit drives for safety & reliability as an external drive, though not discussed here. I had 2 G-Technology drives collapse so I’m not a big fan (though I realize my sample space is small)
Because caldigit doesn’t make any mechanisms, only enclosures.
A great external SSD drive i would recommend as well is the Toshiba Canvio AeroMobile.
It has a 128 GB SSD and it has a slot to add a 128GB SDHC (Micro)SD card as well. it has a build in battery for 8 hours of video streaming and wifi that you can connect to your iOS device. Whats also great is that you can do ‘wifi pass-through’, so you can keep on using your normal wifi network at the same time while connected to this Canvio. its very good, fast, never have buffering even when streaming 4GB movies becouse of the SSD i gues… and finally you can also backup your photos and video’s made with your iPhone/iPad. i love it!
I bought a 3TB Synology drive and it works like magic. I can access my drive far away from home and that is just awesome. I can even create a user account for family or friends to do the same. The apps for it are fuggly though. I wish it were one app instead of several different ones but they work very well and I am extremely pleased with it after a few little hiccups setting it up. You don’t get any setup info in the box, just a link to the website which isn’t the most user friendly. But after that initial frustration it has been smooth sailing.
I’ve used a variety of external drives over the years. I have decided after many disappointments that USB drives suck.
I am 100% Thunderbolt and GLAD I am.
While I currently use external drives for various purposes, I am saving up for a CalDigit T4 (not sure as to the size) to be my main boot-up drive using RAID 5 therefor when I change my main desktop every so many years, I don’t have to go through the laborious task of transferring all of the data from one computer to another, i just simply unplug the T4 and connect to the new computer, boot off the T4 and I’m DONE! HUGE time saver, plus I have hot swappable RAID and it’s MUCH faster than internal HDD. I have checked with people that own this product and they say it works great and their support is great. It’s the cheapest (that I’ve found) Thunderbolt 2 RAID 5 drive that’s bootable. The G-Tech, Promise RAID drives that are equal are about 2x the price. You have to be careful if you are going to use as a bootable drive as the models that do this are typically $2,000+, but CalDigit has T4 models that start at around $900. This way, i can have the speed and reliability of RAID 5, which for those that don’t know what RAID 5 is, it means that with 4 drives, one is a parity drive and 3 are used for data striping your data for speed. It gives you one drive in case one of them goes bad and they are hot swappable. You can change the drives in the T4 as JBOD and other RAID combinations if you want, but I’m going to use RAID 5.
Anyway, it is still recommended to have a Time Machine Backup, just as an extra added precaution. It’s not required, but it is highly recommended.
RAID 5 is no the recommend option anymore for anything. Use Raid 10, better write as you do not have to calculate parity and easier recovery options when a drive fails.
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/356486-why-is-raid5-so-bad
Reblogged this on Garcia Talks about the How To's of the iPhone,iPad,MacBook & Apple Products for Non-Technical Users and commented:
For all of you Apple users out there, who are still learning how to get the most benefits out of your MacBook, MacAir, or iMac, here is an excellent piece of advice about external hard drives from someone who knows.
Shalom,
Pat Garcia
Hi,
Excellent article. Thanks. Your article has answered the questions, I had about external hard drives.
Ciao,
Pat
I am totally paranoid about drive failure because I have been burned by drive failure. I use Time Machine to back up to two external drives alternating between them. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror all of my drives except the Time Machine drives. This means I have a minimum of two and usually three or more copies of every file. The really critical stuff I back up daily to an offsite server.
My conclusion after reading this article: Apple should allow Time Machine to work with iCloud. They should also charge less, like $5/month. Backblaze. I want iCloud to be Backblaze.
Time Capsules should also off RAID options…
Especially when having more than one SSD this could be an alternative. An anodize enclosure in with a slot-in design.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-plops-a-unique-ssd-enclosure
But is focused on drives with a height of 7mm.
I’m surprised there is no discussion of drive speed in this post, there is a significant difference between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM. And, not all SSDs are created equal; some are considerably faster than others.
I have a current model 15″ MacBook Pro with a 1TB internal (Apple/Samsung) SSD. It’s quite fast.
I’ve been using a few G Technology 7200 RPM 1TB USB 3 drives with SuperDuper for backup and they’re excellent and inexpensive.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1009518-REG/g_technology_0g02874_1tb_7200_g_drive_mobile_usb3.html
I backup to drive 1, then swap it with drive 2 which is in a fireproof box in our basement. My internal MBP SSD has about 540GB used on it. Backups with SuperDuper take about 4 minutes (the first one took about 40 minutes).
I bought another G Technology drive initially to test out the speed difference between Thunderbolt and USB 3:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1010736-REG/g_technology_0g03040_1tb_2_5_external_thunderbolt.html
I saw such a small difference it wasn’t worth it to continue buying Thunderbolt drives and now that Apple looks like they’re dumping Thunderbolt for the new USB standard, at least on portable computers, I’m glad I’ve avoided it. For me, the single reason to use Firewire or Thunderbolt is daisy chaining drives but for backup it’s not necessary (for me) so USB 3 is fine.
I’m using that drive for Time Machine. Works fine. Use USB 3 instead of Thunderbolt and it’s plenty fast.
I also have an Oyen Digital external USB 3 SSD that I use for backup when on the road:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1062423-REG/oyen_digital_u318_ssd_960_bk_shadow_mini_external_1tb.html
It has a Samsung SSD in it and it’s crazy fast for both backup and booting a machine. Also, extremely small which is nice for travel.
I’ve always paid a lot of attention to backup and having a reliable way to boot a new computer and migrate my data. To me, it’s worth putting some money and effort into getting this stuff right.
The problem with a Time Capsule or an external hard disk that’s kept in the house as a single backup solution is that they’re not off site. If the house burns down…
Seagate sells the cheapest drives with the shortest warranties.
I’ve had more trouble with Seagate drives than with any other.
WD & Seagate sell only hard drives, which are becoming obsolete, so they may not be in business a whole lot longer.
My Toshiba drives have 3yr warranties, and I doubt Toshiba is going out of business anytime soon.
Choosing the best external hard drive for backup is really important. I have been using Time Capsule as my main backup buddy for iOS devices.
There are now just 3 surviving manufacturers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
Every manufacturer has had good periods and bad periods. It’s neigh on impossible to be able to choose one and one only that is /good/ … as history will repeat itself in all likelihood.
I own two WD My Books and I am having nothing but problems with the My Book Essential. My iMac hard drive crashed and since I had a new one installed, the My Book is not working properly. I cannot remove files, I cannot have Photoshop read them, I cannot transfer files and the software is missing. Not happy with WD, even when formatted for a Mac. Next time, I’m just getting either large flash drives or an apple storage device.
To Jeremy or Israel,
What do you think of OWC external HD? I’ve read they are really reliable. I’m in the market for an external now cause I just had a 2tb Seagate and almost lost 2.5 years of video work. Luckly I was able to recapture. I don’t trust seagate any more. Thanks.
OG
Seriously, there are just about two manufacturers left… Seagate and WD. They do by far the most drives. Every manufacturer has had problems in the past. There is no reason not to trust Seagate or WD these days.
Spinning rust will always fail, it’s just a matter of time; after all, they have moving parts. Just make sure you do good backups and perhaps run drives in RAID1 as a minimum if you can.
Hello,
I am a video editor and I am going to get a new Mac Pro the next couple of days and after all this reading I still have a question. Since I work with large files I don’t know which build up will work better for me. I have the option of buying a Mac Pro and upgrade it with 1TB of storage or instead of that, is getting a external hard drive and manage all my files from there. Since I am a freelance producer sometime I need to carry a hard drive to copy footage for a later edit and in that case an external hard drive will be more useful. What I am concern is Im not sure if working directly from a external hard drive into my computer it will be fast enough to preview/render/process the files. Basically my external hard drive will be my main source to edit and storage large files and the storage on my computer will have only the softwares that I need.
Thanks!
Did you ever get an answer for your question? I do film editing and interior design…so I need speed with rendering videos and 3D drawings on my Macbook Pro.
I use variety of Lacie’s. The most problem I had was with their flash drives. Pretty good customer service and they replaced them immediately BUT still not dependable! No problems with hard drives yet. I got a 1TB Lacie rugged and still kicking after 3 years of abuse! I like it how fast the transfer is with my Macs.
“Each year has 61,320 hours, so a drive with a MTBF of 300,000 hours would promise to last 4.9 years” ? I believe the total number of hours in a year is actually 8,760 hrs / 24 hrs = 365 days. Just thought I’d clarify that.
Jeremy – an interesting post, and very useful to include links to the products you discuss.
However, none the external 3.5″ drives (neither 2.5″ drives nor SSD apply in this) that you recommend has active cooling, something I found a little bewildering.
My interest in this subject: a few years ago, I provided the technical evidence for a California-based Class Action Suit against Apple Inc. for the excessively high failure rate of (almost exclusively) Seagate 2.5″ hard drives supplied in their MacBooks, and this entailed substantial research into the effects of heat on hard drives, hard drive manufacturing procedures, microscopic examination of hard drive sliders and platter surface damage, platter lubrication, fly height, firmware controls and defects, etc.
Excessive heat is a common cause of failure in 3.5″ mechanical drives. Sure, it is nowhere near as bad now as it was five or ten years ago (drive engineering and design in this area has since improved considerably, but it should be a salient point in selecting a drive enclosure that will be more reliable with active cooling.)
Unfortunately, actively cooled housings are fairly scarce, being driven in part by users’ abject intolerance of “noisy” fans, and the manufacturers’ highly questionable claims of temperature control by means of “passive cooling”.
For the past twelve years or so we have been using for certain data recoveries cheap, nasty, sickly green enclosures; they come fitted with a 6cm fan that directs a flow of air over the hard drive’s circuit board, and we have not once encountered a failure with these. Aesthetics should really be the last criterion a user should take into account when purchasing an external storage device!
Thanks again for your article – a good read.
Duncan Clarke
http://www.retrodata.co.uk
My portable LaCie crashed with 10 years worth of music…I would not recommend LaCie for reliability
You think you feel old?? Imagine me, I can remember when internal HDDs didn’t exist and ALL of them were external. My first PC purchase was a Tandy IBM-compatible and I paid nearly $1000 for an external 20MByte HDD. I can also remember a few that glowed inside because they contained TUBES!!. Now that, sir, is old.
Things Must Be Remember In Buying A Hard Disk Drive- Internal Hard Disk and External Hard Disk
Modern Hard Disk Drives replaces traditional Tape Drives. We will discuss many Parameters for choosing best storage media on the basis of two categories – Internal HDD and External HDD
Parameters to be taken in buying an HDD
Physical Size
Capacity(Storage)
Raid
Data Security,Safety and Back up
Connector Technology
Physical Layer Protection
Data Transfer Speed
Cache/Buffer Size
Customer Service and Cost
Warranty
i posted some other tips at my blog…the link is here Things Must Be Remember In Buying A Hard Disk Drive- Internal and External Hard Disk Gadget Tips
Thanks! I want a portable hard drive to store important documents and photos and family videos, so for me long lasting is important. What would be your recommendation for me?
I was hoping for some facts on which portable drives are BOOTABLE.
Contrary to some of the anecdotal evidence here, I have been buying LACIE drives since the early 90s and they have always been rock-solid. I’ve had SCSI, Ultra SCSI and Optical Drives, the original blue-rubber Pocket drives, D2 Firewire and Thunderbolt Drives …I haven’t suffered a single failure with these and passed them on to family once my needs had outgrown them. More recently I have had 3 G-Technology Slim Portable Drives and these have been solid too, but are currently limited to 1TB. I’ve just had to return a G-Technology Thunderbolt portable drive which has lasted just over a year with relatively little use, in terms of portability. It seems that there is no outright winner.
Rather surprised to hear that people have a single back-up and have lost their work. If you’re serious about your digital files then you should be employing at least 2 distinct back-ups in addition to the original files, one of which should be offsite. I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, forget Time Machine.
Thanks for this informative post, much appreciated! One issue I keep having…and have had with three hard drives (MyBook, Toshiba slim portable one, and a Seagate mechanical one) since I got my Macbook Pro is formating challenges. Every one of them have eventually locked me out, and essentially forced me to reformat them. One of them…I lost all my data on. I’ve tried formatting them for Mac and also the formatting that works with Mac and Windows….both with the same result.
This post helps clear things up a bit, and I’m sure…going with a Mac hard drive is the safe way to go, but I’m honestly scared to trust them because of my experience.
Do you have any advice on this issue? Or, know of a resource that will help clear up my understanding on it? Thanks so much in advance!
Hi. I have a Seagate external drive with my music stored on it. When I run itunes it is now regularly jumping through to the next song as if it is booting up again or skipping somehow. Has anyone had problems like that and do you know what it might be and/or what to do about it?
I assume personal computer is safer when compared to these external harddisk devices also will this be something different that we cannot use them with windows based system backup?
Recently my hard disk crashed and unfortunately my years of data is not recoverable after an big effort.
So I suggested my readers to backup their data before a crash that no one would know when why that happens in my article on newandroidphones.in
Glad to read this article…
Thanks for linking to a bunch of products on Amazon that work for PC ONLY. I thought this was a guide for Mac external harddrives???
If you want to loose data, go for wd mybook for mac. ;)
I own Seagate Plus Portable Drive and suppose that it backs up this computer challenged person’s MacBook Pro like it is suppose to; the problem is I am unable to retrieve my photos and some of my files. For this person, it is not user friendly. I would like something portable, dependable and easy to access all data/photos, etc.